"Robot" coding game.

Id rather do a contest where the goal was to make the most human-like AI, as opposed to the most capable. IT would be judged by what percentage of people thought your bot was a human player in game, and what percentage thought it was a bot.

There is already a well-known [Carlos needs to change the forum color so you can see this link->]contest for that.

Human ai is really hard to do. I've tried it using some genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks. That kind of contest is too tough for this crowd I suspect. But hey, that's just me. Maybe it'd work. I wouldn't enter that one though, because I've already tried and failed in my own endeavor (what would be the point of *proving* I can't do it?).

I'm still with the piped sub-process idea where you can write whatever program you want to control a robot in a given environment. Maybe the contest needs two stages: One where contestants compete to create the host environment with the graphics and everything, and the other where the contestants do the ai programming in the forked sub-process launched from the winner of the previous `host' contest.

AnotherJake Wrote:Maybe the contest needs two stages: One where contestants compete to create the host environment with the graphics and everything, and the other where the contestants do the ai programming in the forked sub-process launched from the winner of the previous `host' contest.

Sounds fun, I already have a head start but It doesn't mean I would win
Is anyone else thinking of doing this?

If the robots are all based on pipe's it wouldn't be too hard to have a player controlled over a network, its a possiblity for whogbens idea.

Andrew Sage Wrote:It depends on what the aim of the contest is. If it is to simulate the programming of a robot with a very simple processor and limited memory then the code limits are entirely justifiable.

The sense of achievement at getting something like this working within such constraints is much greater then doing the same with unlimited resources.

Maybe, but what's a "limited processor?" Even something "simple" like the Lego Mindstorms can run Java code. While 64k might be a tiny amount of memory, It's still enough to hold a couple thousand lines of java code and still have a couple Kb's left for data space.

The problem that I see with this is that no one will agree on how limited it should be. (doesn't that sound familiar...) A couple of years ago I might have agreed that it would be more fun to program a robot in 6502 assembly, but my tastes have changed since then. While interesting, I have no want to program at such a low level anymore.

My issue is that programming pretty much anything at such a low level is a challenge all its own that has nothing to do with AI programming. I want to try my hand at programming more AI, and I might want to try to write a minimalist implementation of an algorithm in assembly, but not at the same time.

I realize this topic is out of date - but, as an alternate robot contest suggestion, I am a big fan of Robocode (http://www.robowiki.net). It's Java, and there's an active community for it, so any robot coding contest could potentially use Robocode.

Probably a useless reply, since this discussion died, but I thought I'd mention it.

I wanted people to make a robot coding game in a contest last year (in RunRev), but the community is ridiculous small, so nothing ever came of it.
Then i tried to make my own, but like all projects i do, that died quickly.
I am more interested in how to make a robot coding game, then to code the robots, but maybe a code limit would allow me to finish something for a change...